Through an incubation program, the companies will hatch a dozen five-minute toons for Frederator's Cartoon Hangover YouTube channel, one of which will go to series.

SPA will fund 12 five-minute animated shorts, with one premiering every month on Seibert’s Cartoon Hangover YouTube channel. One of these shorts will then become a limited series for the channel, flexing a larger partnership between the two companies to develop and produce animated feature films and TV-quality cartoons on the internet.

A former president of Hanna-Barbera, Seibert founded Frederator in 1998 as an incubator for short cartoons that could potentially spawn bigger projects. In the years since, it has produced more than 200 short films that have resulted in 16 hit TV and online series, including Butch Hartman’s The Fairly OddParents on Nickelodeon and Pendleton Ward’s Adventure Time on Cartoon Network.

Frederator’s Channel Frederator Network has more than 1,000 channels on YouTube dedicated to animation that receive in excess of 70 million views a month. Launched in late 2012, its Cartoon Hangover channel has featured such toons as Pendleton Ward’s Bravest Warriors (pictured) and Natasha Allegri’s Bee and PuppyCat, the latter of which raised US$872,133 via a Kickstarter campaign to fund a six-episode series that debuts on Thursday.

Sony Pictures Animation is responsible for such animated big-screen hits as Open Season, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Hotel Transylvania, The Smurfs and the upcoming Hotel Transylvania 2 (opening September 2015).